Eve of Kilcargin

In 1919 Clara Bridewell, a widow of the Great War, receives an invitation to stay with her well-to-do aunt in the Irish countryside, to provide a stabilising influence on her unruly young cousin Eve. Upon arriving, she discovers that the family are destitute, and their sprawling country house is virtually a ruin. Clara soon finds herself embroiled in her aunt’s scheme to marry Eve to a wealthy young aristocrat in order to save the family home. But the feelings she develops for her cousin, and the Irish struggle for independence from Britain, threaten to derail their plans…

Eve of Kilcargin is a charming tale of family, identity, and desire versus duty, set against the backdrop of the Irish War of Independence. Originally written in rural New Zealand in the early 1950s, it would surely have been a landmark in lesbian fiction if it had ever seen the light of day, but was sadly incomplete at the time of the author’s death. The story of her brief and troubled life, and her only novel’s seventy-year journey to publication reads like a work of fiction in itself, with the manuscript believed lost in a fire until the 1990s, and finally completed in a posthumous collaboration between aunt and grandniece seven decades after its inception.